Rails 2.3.14 on Ruby 1.9.3

Rails 2 hasn’t been maintained for quite a while, and it last officially supported Ruby 1.9.1. I was working on getting an old Rails 2 app upgraded to Rails 3 and discovered something frustrating: Rails 2.3.14 don’t boot under Ruby 1.9.3 unless every single controller has a helper class defined in a helper file. I didn’t want to sit around creating 60 helper files, so I did the expedient thing, patching the app’s boot.rb file to not raise exceptions on missing helper files.

It turned out to not be a terribly large amount of code, but here’s a diff just in case anyone else is upgrading a really old Rails app and runs into the same issue: